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Warhammer is a range of tabletop strategy games; Total War is a series of historical battle simulations. Combining the two should have produced a black hole of nerdiness so unapproachable it would crush all mortals. Strangely, however, this is probably the most accessible each game has been for years.

Knolek SunEater has really lived. He’s stood on mountaintops sucking up the lightning just because he could. He’s battled dragons and served the lords of Chaos since time immemorial. He’s twenty feet tall with six scaly limbs and electricity crackling from his eyes. He’s totally, totally what Warhammer Fantasy Battle is all about. But it turns out that all his history is no use if you send him charging on his own into the heart of a enemy Total War army. Against those odds, even Kholek Suneater turns and runs like a whipped hound.

“A Midsummer Night’s Dream follows the adventures of some fairies, some peasant actors attempting to put on a romantic play that’s a bit like a rubbish Romeo & Juliet, some star-crossed aristocrats who all drink love potions, and, for some reason, Theseus and Hippolyta. That makes it a hodge-podge of Greek myth, contemporary satire, romantic farce, and Middle High German epic poetry. In contemporary lingo, it’s Shakespeare laying intercontinuity crossover on with a trowel.”

Battlefleet Gothic gets so much right. The campaign’s story, script, voice acting and appearance is all spot-on for the 40K universe. The 2D battles are challenging and interesting, if still quite unbalanced. The RPG elements are horribly compelling. And its detailed, nebula-filled universe brings the tiny tabletop models to life—before they’re blown into thousands of pieces.

Dark Souls 3 returns the player to the series’ grim world, again tackling the endless problems of the undead peoples of Lothric. Your task this time, as an undead hero, is to defeat the corrupted Lords of Cinder and return them to the throne room that now sits inside the Firelink Shrine. It’s an unusually clear remit for a Dark Souls game, and it’s matched by the game’s revamped mechanics.

Microsoft knows it missed the boat with Windows 8. But the team also think they have a fair idea of what they did wrong, and they think this forwarding looking smorgasbord of integration, accessibility and standardization is their solution. They’re providing an OS designed for VR and AR; support for any major VR or AR device; and their own high-end, high-detail AR device.With that OS being supported across PCs, mobile phones and the Xbox One, and featuring a tied-down app store in a way that PC users are unused to, Microsoft has set a very alluring trap to snare the VR market.

Kickstarter isn’t what it was. Back in 2013, the pitch “Dungeon Keeper in space” garnered Maia £140,000. Skip ahead three years and another charming pitch – “Dwarf Fortress meets Elite” – barely scraped £10,000. That’s absolutely no reflection of the quality of the product. After all, despite being a one-man game, Sol Trader is well on course to hit its release window of June 2016 as a stable, intriguing game. It’s just a reflection on the changed times for indies; today, the determinant of success seems to be a tightening social web of ‘in’ indie developers and press, and its creator Chris Parsons isn’t part of that web.